Tuesday, 19 November 2013

This blog is dormant for the time being. It is good to see that it generated some interest and continues to get a steady trickle of views. Most people visiting will be interested in the seven posts at the top of the page with the title What is Social Acceleration. In those posts I develop the idea of social acceleration, drawing on the ideas of James Gleick, Hartmut Rosa and David Harvey among others. My current interests focus more on the city and I am researching the area of city branding as well as experimenting with writing about the city from the perspective of social semiotics. Some writing relating to these interests can be found on my blog, Social Semiotics and the City.

Saturday, 31 December 2011

The park was closed in order to deny protesters access to the parliament buildings within

The relatively insignificant Barcelona stock exchange became a target of protest...

Dirk and Rosa making their saucepans heard...

These last two are of a sign at the entrance to Paternoster Square in London, which the protesters had originally wanted to occupy. What had until then been presented as a public square, was suddenly bristling with security guards and barriers.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has equipped a deep-space probe with a pictorial message 'on the off-chance that somewhere on the way it is intercepted by intelligent scientifically educated beings.' It is unlikely that their effort was meant to be taken quite seriously, but what if we try? These beings would first of all have to be equipped with 'receivers' among their sense organs that respond to the same band of electromagnetic waves as our eyes do. Even in that unlikely case they could not possibly get the message. Reading an image, like the reception of any other message, is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities; we can only recognize what we know. Even the sight of the awkward naked figures in the illustration cannot be separated in our mind from our knowledge. We know that feet are for standing and eyes are for looking and we project this knowledge onto these configurations, which would look 'like nothing on earth' without this prior information. It is this information alone that enables us to separate the code from the message; we see which of the lines are intended as contours and which are intended as conventional modelling. Our 'scientifically educated' fellow creatures in space might be forgiven if they saw the figures as wire constructs with loose bits and pieces hovering weightlessly in between. Even if they deciphered this aspect of the code, what would they make of the woman's right arm that tapers off like a flamingo's neck and beak? The creatures are 'drawn to scale against the outline of the spacecraft,' but if the recipients are supposed to understand foreshortening, they might also expect to see perspective and conceive the craft as being further back, which would make the scale of the manikins minute. As for the fact that 'the man has his right hand raised in greeting' (the female of the species presumably being less outgoing), not even an earthly Chinese or Indian would be able to correctly interpret this gesture from his own repertory.The representation of humans is accompanied by a chart: a pattern of lines beside the figures standing for the 14 pulsars of the Milky Way, the whole being designed to locate the sun of our universe. A second drawing (how are they to know it is not part of the same chart?) 'shows the earth and the other planets in relation to the sun and the path of Pioneer from earth and swinging past Jupiter.' The trajectory, it will be noticed, is endowed with a directional arrowhead; it seems to have escaped the designers that this is a conventional symbol unknown to a race that never had the equivalent of bows and arrows. (Gombrich 1974, 255-8;Gombrich 1982, 150-151).

Friday, 9 September 2011

“Like so many people these days we live in the suburbs and Dave needs the car for business”

“It’s a whole new way of life. Now I’m free to go anywhere, do anything, see anybody, anytime I want to.”

1950's suburban living, in fact, imprisoned people in an urban form from which the only escape was the car. The scale upon which the city had been built presupposed ownership of a car, and from then on the American ideal of freedom was synonymous with consumption.

“I couldn’t even shop when I wanted to!”

Adverts at this time, and I guess any time, are not simply for one product, the car, but for a whole consumer lifestyle, in which all the elements are mutually supportive.

Wednesday, 24 August 2011

For a number of years I've been trying to get to grips with the notion of growth. This started as an attempt to understand why it is that economies have to grow. The framing criteria of the 'health' or 'sickness' of an economy is always the extent to which GDP has grown. Low growth is unquestionably bad. Zero growth is described as stagnation. Negative growth a catastrophe. But why, I wondered, 'stagnation'. Why not 'equilibrium', or 'doing just fine, thanks' or even 'prioritizing other things at the minute'. I was quite aware that from a certain standpoint, these questions must appear as simply naive- there is no way that the principle of growth could play such a founding role in virtually all discussions about the economy without the reasons for its importance having been analysed to the compete satisfaction of all concerned, such that further discussion was not deemed necessary.

Still, I liked to consider that I was not an unintelligent person, that I was capable of grasping difficult ideas as long as they are patiently explained to me or I dedicate the time to trying to understand them, and yet there seemed to be something of a vacuum when it came to understanding this whole notion of growth.

Two things were clear. First, that growth was a non-negotiable requirement of the economic system that was increasingly being disseminated globally. Second, that it was patently unsustainable and the cause of a good deal of the social, environmental and psychological problems that are blighting, or will soon be blighting, the lives of just about everyone everywhere. The idea that the global economy could continue to achieve the requisite 3% compound growth per annum, with all this represented in terms of exponential increases in production and consumption, appeared to be transparently ludicrous. And yet this continued to be the framing assumption of any discussion of economic or social development. The answer to global poverty? economic growth. Urban degeneration? economic growth. Trans-national conflicts? economic growth.

Whatever the shortcomings of this model of economic development, the principle of economic growth remains the motor which is driving the acceleration of the pace of life that has been theorized by the likes of Harmut Rosa and Paul Virilio. As such it seems to be of paramount importance to understand the dynamics of this process.

In my on-going attempt to make sense of the enigma of growth, I recently exchanged emails with David Harvey on this question. He was good enough to respond to my questions and I post the exchange in full because I found it very useful as a way to think through issues relating to the dynamic of economic growth and I hope that others might find it equally thought-provoking.

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 11:34 PM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: question

Dear Professor Harvey,

I'm a teacher living in Barcelona who has been influenced by your work and I am in the process of preparing a course which will run from October entitled "Brand Barcelona; Selling Barcelona in a Globalised World". I want the students to locate the question of place branding and it's consequent effects upon the inhabitants of the city with the context of the globalisation of capital accumulation. The role played by cities in absorbing surplus capital is clearly of central importance, but it is here that I find myself hitting a wall in terms of my understanding of your work, and the dynamics of capital accumulation more generally, that I have hitherto been unable to resolve. Briefly stated, the question is as follows;

The capitalist mode of production produces surplus capital which must subsequently be reinvested. The process of urbanisation is, in part, driven by this need to reinvest the surplus. This requirement is partly due to the dynamics of capitalism and partly due to the fact that an excess of uninvested capital will lead to a devaluation of that capital through inflation. So large scale urban projects like those of Haussman's Paris or Moses's suburbanisation are in part a response to the requirement for surplus capital absoption. However, the funding of such projects always require the invention of new financial arrangements, such as debt financing. The question which I can't resolve is this; if the problem is a surplus of capital, why are such mechanisms as 'debt financing' necessary? Surely the point is that the capital is already available and ready for investment. Why is there a requirement to generate fresh capital?

I wouldn't contact you directly with this if I hadn't been unable to find a satisfactory answer in forums and browsing articles. Please feel free to direct me to an article or a website where this question is dealt with.

Thank you for helping with this and also for producing such an illuminating body of work over the years (I'm sure that's not the best metaphor, but you know what I mean).

Yours,

Oliver Sutton

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:41:47 -0400

Subject: RE: question

the answer is that it is available in commodity form but not in monetary form. I send you a short piece that explains this, and another longer piece on the relation which is due to be published in socialist Register in the fall.

david Harvey

________________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:30 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

Dear Professor Harvey,

Thank you so much for your reply and the articles. I'll need a little more time with the second one. As for the first one, 'Voting to end Capitalism', while I found it wonderfully concise and illustrative, it didn't resolve this conceptual impasse that I've hit.

The capitalist has harnessed technology and labour power to generate a surplus. this surplus is originally in commodity form- ie 100 pairs of shoes. Options open to the capitalist are either to consume the surplus himself- but what the hell is he going to do with 100 pairs of of shoes? or reinvest the surplus into expansion- more labour power, machines, more shoes. In the first case the surplus remains a commodity- shoes. In the second case, the capitalist can't invest a commodity, he has to convert the commodity into the money form by selling the commodity at the market. But, it seems to me, this is where the problem is. Where is the effective demand going to come from for his shoes? It must be other capitalists like him who are effectively engaged in a zero sum game of making profits out of their own consumption. If, for what ever reason, he does succeed in converting the commodity into money form, (assuming that when you say in the 7th paragraph of your piece "...through investment in expansion..." this means that he has converted the surplus into money form and so can invest it) then there is no problem. He doesn't have to debt finance the expansion of the means of production because has converted his surplus into money form and can use the surplus directly to invest in expansion.

If, however, the problem is fundamentally one of effective demand, then I could clearly see how debt financing would be the solution, albeit an inherently unstable and crisis prone one. Furthermore I can see how this operates in the real world. What I still don't get, either in the real world or in the theory, is how an excess of liquidity can be resolved through the generation of further liquidity in form of debt finance?

Perhaps the longer piece will help to resolve this.

Thanks once again, I'll leave a link to my blog

yours,

Oliver

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2011 07:26:11 -0400

Subject: RE: question

no the longer piece does not do so directly. The presumption is that the debt moneys at the end of the first day have to be equivalent to the real surplus value produced in commodity form at the end of the second day (when the problem of effective demand gets posed all over again) and this means that the 100 pairs of shoes have become 110 pairs of shoes and maybe nobody wants the shoes (they get devalued) but there was a possibility of getting people to want disneyland instead. The surplus liquidity problem is where does the reinvestment go? expansion of shoe production for ever? or can something else be made that people either want or can be persuaded or mandated to want (which is where the production of urban environments comes in.....we need cars because we created an urbanization that made cars necessities not luxuries. Th surplus liquidity lies in the reinvestment function of the credit moneys looking for profitable outlets other than shoes.

dh

__________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2011 7:12 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

"The surplus liquidity problem is where does the reinvestment go?"- but there is no surplus liquidity, there is a surplus of commodities; the 10 shoes that no one wants. The consequence of this would be that the shoes get devalued, the capitalist can't repay the debt (because he has not been capable of generating enough capital in money-form) and the system grinds to a halt. Where does the surplus liquidity come from? Perhaps I'm taking the temporal structure of the model to literally (which would explain your tense change when you said "...but there was a possibility of getting people to want disneyland instead...". However if this is the case it seems as if the model requires of us a theoretical leap of faith whereby Disneyworld owes its existence to the fact that it would have solved the effective demand problem if only the capitalist had thought of it before he churned out the 110 shoes. In fact the capitalist, on this model, never generates the liquid capital that would enable him to invest in a Disneyworld. Do you think this a problem of taking the model too literally, is it a conceptual misunderstanding or is it a disagreement?

yours,

Oliver

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:08:39 -0400

Subject: RE: question

credit is time future discounted into time present so you literally mortgage the future in order to save the present, that is why it is not money but credit money that does the trick and who creates that? privately the capitalist can do it but the state also does it and now look at how much money the fed has created with the flick of a switch these last few years...

________________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Friday, July 01, 2011 5:59 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

Which would suggest that what I referred to as a theoretical leap of faith is, in fact, a contradiction inherent to the system. The credit that was used to get the system up and running can never be repaid, the capitalist can only ever stay one step ahead of his creditors in a vast and burgeoning Ponzi scheme. This would also suggest then that it is debt financing which is the motor of the system flooding the system with a form of fictitious capital which nonetheless generates very material transformations.

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2011 08:34:35 -0400

Subject: RE: question

exactly...as Marx notes, the credit system is very protestant and depends on faith (expectations, confidence, Luther, etc.) while the monetary commodity is very catholic and depends on gold and every now and again (e.g. in a crisis) we find that the system cannot liberate itself fully (pre-1973) from what Marx calls the the catholicism of its monetary base (which is why the right often demands a return to the gold standard, which would mean the end of capitalism).

dh

________________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 5:28 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

And that particular drama is being very clearly played out in the wrangling over the debt ceiling in the US. As you say, it's deeply ironic that it should be the Republicans who are willing to put the whole system in jeopardy, although their high-minded stance fairly reeks of corporate interest.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my emails. I must admit that I still worry about those ten extra shoes and what happens to them, but that may just be the desire for a tidy narrative.

I noticed that you are speaking in Bristol in mid July. I will be working at the University of Leeds from late July to mid-September- will you be speaking anywhere in the UK during this period?

Oliver Sutton

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 07:15:10 -0400

Subject: RE: question

I have had to cancel the bristol event owing to medical issues. but thanks for asking. it was useful to think through the ten airs of shoes.

dh

________________________________________

I'm sorry to hear that, I hope that you get back to full strength quickly and I'll be watching out for any speaking dates (it would be great to hear you speak in Barcelona!).

It's worth spreading this astonishing film from the disturbances outside the Catalan parliament to remind ourselves of the lengths to which the authorities will go to undermine the emergence of a popular movement. The legitimacy of 15M depends on people identifying with it. At the moment it's a bit like Schrodinger's cat, in a state of unresolved possibilities. A massive turnout for the demonstration tomorrow could be a defining moment in the formation of a genuinely popular movement.

Sunday, 5 June 2011

Seeing as so much time has elapsed since my last posting under the title of “Globalization, Time-Space Compression and Symbolic Exchange”, I think it’s as well to provide a brief reminder of the terrain.* My intention with this cycle of postings is to think about globalisation, paying particular attention to the way in which the apparent transparency of the term conceals assumptions regarding the character of the globe which is being globalised. On the one hand the process of globalisation, influenced by the demand for capital accumulation, is an indisputable reality that is affecting every area of our lives (See “What is Social Acceleration”). On the other, it conceals and disseminates, Eurocentric assumptions about the nature of space, time and subjectivity. I approached these themes first by highlighting a distinction, made by Heidegger, between the concepts of Earth and World. ‘World’ refers not necessarily to a physical reality, but rather to a field of meaning and signification, in the sense of ‘the world of medicine’ or ‘the world of football’. It is really, first and foremost, a world in which we live. Earth, superficially, might be described un-problematically as a physical entity, one planet amongst others in the solar system. The difficulty is that, no matter how much we may prioritise the foundational nature of Earth, to insist that it is the Earth upon which we live, it remains an entity which we do not, in fact, encounter, as such. Images of the Earth abound. However, in this sense, the Earth is only ever one more sign within the plethora of signs and meanings which constitute our worlds. My intention was, and is, to render the notion of ‘Earth’ questionable in order to then gain a different sort of purchase on ‘Globalisation’. Specifically I want to foreground the notion of ‘World’, as a system, or systems, of significations, references, and meanings, within which materiality plays a role, but not a founding role. In the last post I sought to highlight this by characterising the Yir Yoront’s relation to time in terms of social ‘homeostasis’. The ‘history’ of the Yir Yoront was determined not by objectively verifiable facts, but by what it was expedient to remember. To forget something is to annihilate it in its entirety, such that it never did occur. The only problem with this is that it is grammatically untidy. A related position can be adopted with regard space and geography, namely that the particular model of universal space with which we operate is very much a consequence of our literacy, which has enabled us to abstract from the immediacy of our apperception**.

I would imagine that, for many people, raising questions about our notion of space might seem like a rather pointless exercise in metaphysical speculation. We don’t practically have a problem with space. We aren’t bumping into things due to an unreliable model of space, and our model of space seems to provide us with a very functional and effective way of representing territory. The problem, I believe, relates to the second of these examples, not to the first. Our phenomenal apprehension of space, when making coffee for example, is of a categorically different order from the way we represent space, just as our unreflective apprehension of time is quite distinct from the ways in which we measure it. The point is that there is nothing “natural” about the notion of absolute, objective, quantifiable space which we take so much for granted and which is central to our ideas of territory and property. Once again, examples of resistance to, or alternatives to Eurocentric representations of space abound among pre-literate peoples. Marshall McLuhan cites Guinean born Prince Modupe who, in his autobiography, tells how he had learned to read maps at school and of how his father had been decidedly unimpressed by the flimsy sheet of paper which presumed to represent territory.

“He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him. . . . Maps are liars, he told me briefly. From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled. ... I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured on tired feet. With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden, heat-weighted treks. (1)

This represents a striking illustration of the adage “the map is not the territory”.

Similarly, Daniel Everett, in his book, Don’t Sleep there are Snakes, describes how the Amazonian tribe, the Pirahã, have no conception of things that fall outside of their immediate experience, or the experience of someone with whom they have directly spoke (2). Hence their reluctance to listen to his evangelising about Jesus Christ on learning that Everett had never actually met the man. More relevant to a consideration of space is the Pirahã notion of xibipíío. This word might be used to describe a boat coming into view from around the bend in the river, a candle flame extinguishing or a plane appearing on, or disappearing, over the horizon. Everett managed to establish that xibipíío picked out a culturally specific concept relating to experiential liminality; that’s to say the state of something’s being on the border of existence and non-existence, experientially speaking. The contention is that the Pirahã don’t extrapolate from what is presented immediately in their experience and that concepts of arrival and departure presuppose the existence of a territory or space which lies beyond the field of their immediate experience. Things don’t so much appear from around the corner, as come into being. If that sounds impossibly improbable, imagining it from the point of “view” of the deaf person may make it slightly more comprehensible. It doesn’t offend against intuition quite so much to suggest that the plane pops into existence if ones only means of perceiving it is sound. This disjunction between the fact that experiential liminality is unacceptable when related to the visual field and yet plausible when related to the aural field illustrates another contention of McLuhan’s, that the absolute primacy of the visual is a characteristic of literacy.

What characterises the oral cultures that I have discussed in this and the previous posting is that their societies are not grounded on absolute notions of time and space, which means that they provide a radical counterpoint to Eurocentric, or literate, historiography and geography. *** What they reveal, and what gets concealed within literate cultures, is the homeostatic nature of society and culture. Time and space are not containers into which we are thrown and in which we set about constructing culture and society. Rather time and space are inseparable from our practices. Just as the Yir Yoront collectively conspire to adjust their past to the exigencies of the present, so Europeans collectively conspire to sustain their historiographies. **** Of course we are a little uncomfortable with the idea of adjusting them to meet the demands of the present and yet all recounting and dissemination of the past is clearly carried out in the present and must serve some current purpose. Sarah Palin’s recent reinterpretation of American history, and the way it is being defended by her acolytes, provides a cheap, but illustrative, example of this. The principal differences between the Yir Yoront’s mythological past and the historical past of European peoples, leaving aside the crucial divisions we make between personal and public history, are:

·the externalisation of knowledge (knowledge is not contained in the body of the knower, but on parchment, manuscript, in book or database form)

·the degree of coordination involved in reinforcing and disseminating that history (the homogenising effect of the media through which that history is narrated, be that books, academic disciplines and museums or more recently, and more shakily, docu-dramas, quiz shows and internet forums *****)

·the regulatory mechanisms through which relevance or obsolescence are determined (selective memory in the case of oral cultures, academic coherence, political expediency and potential for commodification in ours)

·The mythological past of the Yir Yoront is unapologetically symbolic in nature, whereas the goal of European thought has been to replace the symbolic with the factual. A better way of stating this might be to say that the aim has been to systematise the symbolic such that it becomes undeniable, unquestionable and, hence, impersonal.

On this last point, the heyday of factual, objectively verifiable knowledge was from the renaissance to the late 20th century; a period which coincided with the invention of the printing press, the extensive dissemination of books, the rise of mass literacy and the technological innovations that facilitated first a Europe-wide and then a global reconfiguration of culture and society. However, for all the coordination and dissemination of Eurocentric concepts and practices, they remain no better grounded than the mythological past of the Yir Yoront and no more compelling as a model for living than that of the Pirahã of the Amazon. In each case, each one of us embody and are the product of the entirety of our culture. Technological changes within the culture give rise to more or less subtle reconfigurations of that culture in its entirety and concomitantly reconfigures us and our mental conceptions, histories and value systems.

The social structure of the Yir Yoront was irreparably disrupted by the encounter with European people, not because Europeans colonised their territory or spread disease, but rather through the introduction of alien technologies and associated mental conceptions. The paradigm example used by Lauriston Sharp is the introduction of the steel axe into the world of the Yir Yoront by missionaries (3). The Yir Yoront had been using stone axes for millennia. The stone axe was not simply a utilitarian object, it held a key position in the symbolic economy of the Yir Yoront. There were implicitly understood codes which governed how the axe was produced (involving intricate trading relationships with other tribes and rituals for its fabrication) and who had ownership and access to the axe (women and children could not own an axe but had to borrow it from the male head of the family). Introducing steel, factory made, axes into this symbolic economy had the effect of de-structuring the economy and the social relations that it implied.

In subsequent postings I will consider how technological innovations in Europe generated a reconfiguration in its symbolic economy that accelerated and intensified with the development of money as a universal medium of exchange (clearly symbolic, and yet sufficiently standardised and universalised to conceal its symbolic nature). This, along with the reconfiguration of mental conceptions that this transformation implied (in the fields of geography and cartography, for example), contributed to what David Harvey refers to as space/time compression and the elaboration of a symbolic economy which annihilates geographical distance.

* Notice how territorial metaphors suggest themselves so readily (map out, chart, navigate). This is neither incidental in terms of language, nor in terms of the project that I am engaged in. Can the ideas I’m describing be rightly equated with a territory? They probably can if I will insist on that highly abstracted and literate practice of developing ideas over a series of postings / chapters / paragraphs, etc…

** I choose ‘apperception’ as opposed to ‘perception’, because whereas the later has a clear visual bias, the former refers to a much broader field which makes no clear distinction between the sensory and the cognitive.

*** This ‘Eurocentric’ / ‘literate’ division is interesting. By choosing the former term as the opposition to oral cultures, a whole discourse of cultural relativism is activated along with its concurrent limits to thought. If the later term is chosen, I feel the nature of the European colonial project is better revealed. Europe is not one culture among others in the cultural soup that makes up the world. Rather, the world becomes world to the extent to which it can be metabolized within the structures and terms of a totalising conceptual / system, the source of which is overwhelmingly European. From this perspective, America is also essentially European.

**** I use the word ‘historiographies’ to highlight the heterogeneous nature of the writing, recounting and dissemination of the past.

***** Also important are strategic devices for reinforcing certain narratives, such as using bullet points.